This explains the ridiculous technology. At some point, the NID got their hands on a sarcophagus, and they reverse engineered it to invent the Med-Pod. Being the elitists that they are, they weren't interested in improving the lives of the common people, regardless of how much money they could make doing so. As a result, they built Elysium, obtaining financing by selling lots there complete with Med-Pods and the promise of nigh-immortality. It also doubled as a defense against alien attack- if any hostile aliens show up, it'll be the commoners on the surface taking the casualties, while Elysium simply avoids the problem by maneuvering away from Earth.

Sarcophagus does eat your soul and make you evil...which makes your WMG a Fridge Horror given the ending.

Overuse of the sarcophagus is what drives people insane, so as long as the people of Earth only use it for life-threatening cases they should be fine. But it explains perfectly why so many people on Elysium - who use it to fix crow's feet - are cold-blooded sociopaths who don't care about Earthers dying of easily-treated leukemia or radiation poisoning. And given how familiar Kruger and his men are with the device - one even mentioned how pissed off Kruger was after having his legs re-attached a few years earlier - him being Ax-Crazy makes all kinds of sense, as does him going completely bugfuck nuts upon having his face regenerated.

It's implicit in the series that the psychological problems are a result of cumulative exposure—and the sarcophagus inheriently addictive. It's basically a malfunctioning Auto Doc that will eventually add free induced psychopathy.

We didn't get nothing from the alien tech and the prawns are either still in South Africa or got picked up when their friends came back. In fact a retaliatory alien attack could have been the "ecological catastrophe" that turned Earth into a Crapsack World.

Even better, Kruger may actually be Wikus from D9. He's old enough, assuming he got his Prawnishnes fixed.

My own personal take was once humans reverse engineered the prawn tech, humans exterminated all the prawns, and the tech is what all the tech in this movie is based on.

Kruger was once upon a time normal.

How else do you explain him getting into such a position, where he can have access to weapons like he does? He used to be a logical agent for the government, but he had a head injury, which (like we saw in the movie) he healed from... Needless to say, he came back just a tad wrong. However, the change was really really subtle, so his superiors didn't catch on. After that one incident, it happened over and over and over and over again, leaving him the katana-crazy villain we saw in this movie.

Specifically, in between Mega Man ZX and Mega Man Legends. In Legends, Earth is covered in ruins of a high-tech organization that used to inhabit it but left for some reason. In Legends 2, we find out about a distant world called Elysium, where humanity used to exist in peace with absurdly advanced technology, and that the citizens of Elysium were the descendents of the people that created the ruins. By this point, however, Elysium is uninhabited.

In the Mega Man ZX games, the last series of games before the time-skip to the Legends games, the line between humans and androids has begun to blur, as humans convert themselves into cyborgs and androids become increasingly human-like. It is also mentioned that they are creating a world called Elysium.

Due to Max's actions, the quality of life on Earth is improved to the point where true rebuilding can begin and the slums are restored to full cities. A few years later, the first true missions to Mars are launched using Elysium, which is now a glorified Space Station as a launching point, and the Prothean relics are found. Then, the next is history.

Then that would mean Elysium was also renamed Arcturus Station prior to the mission to Mars and moved after the discovery of the relay.

Kruger, born in the early 70's, was *young* for an Elysian.

Carlyle, Delacourt, et al were in their 90's when the initial cure for aging that would become the med-bays was invented sometime around the present day. He was in his late thirties, and made himself useful enough as a merc to be restored to functioning youth again and again. He is also running out of time, because, even prior to being fired, he's not allowed to return to Elysium to be restored again.

This is the post-atomic horror of the Star Trek universe.

The planet is burnt out from some new type of nuke, the oil ran out, and somewhere else, to fit with some other mass guesses, the latter half of the Mad Max series is going on in Australia, and just about every other crapsack world that doesn't directly contradict some other one. Actually Mad Max would have happened much earlier, but...

The Earth is a crapsack world because people stopped dying.

Remember that whole medical chamber where people started being revived? What if those chambers were publicly available via humanitarian services? People stop dying, lifespans increase, the amount of children in the world doubles, even triples. Eventually, the overpopulation crisis is so insanely terrible that mass famine and poverty strike most of the first world, which leads to the world of LA we see in the film. Now you have gotten people in the 20th century still alive, even corporate execs, who now have access to near immortality.

Community

Tropes HQ

TVTropes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from thestaff@tvtropes.org. Privacy Policy